Fujitsu Laboratories developed a technology that can measure a person’s pulse in real time using a camera phone, or any other digital camera.

The magic happens by measuring variations in the brightness of the person’s face thought to be caused by the flow of blood. It is based on the characteristic of hemoglobin in blood, which absorbs green light without requiring any special hardware. In that sense, the system work by simply pointing a camera at a person’s face for as little as five seconds.

The software starts to work by shooting video of a subject and calculating average values for the color components (red/green/blue) in a certain area of the face for each frame. Next comes the removal of irrelevant signal data that is present in all three color components only to extract the brightness waveform from the green component. The pulse rate is then computed based on the peaks in that brightness waveform.

Fujitsu Laboratories now looks to put this tech into practical use in fiscal 2013 for a variety of applications such as a security or health monitoring and maintenance solution, building it into smartphones, tablets and PCs…